Garage Sale Gold: Clue Games and 221B Baker Street

One of my dirty little secrets is that I'm a garage sale fiend. I'm happy to scour piles and piles of junk for...among other things...board games (what else?). I don't often find much that's interesting. A game of Monopoly here and there (especially if it's a lame university edition). Usually a couple copies of Scene-It (Twilight edition or Hannah Montana edition). Maybe a copy of Trivial Pursuit. But mostly you just find kids games. Gaa.

But today, I hit gold!

Okay...maybe more like silver. (It's not like I found Aquaretto new in shrink, or anything.) The following games were just tossed on some card table, waiting for me to take them home: Clue: Master Detective, Clue: The Great Museum Caper, and 221B Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes and the Time Machine. And all of these beauties were just a buck each. Now, seeing as I didn't even have a dime on me (not for lack of checking under the car seats, I assure you), I had to put the games "on hold", and drive my car down my street as fast as I could...tear the kid out of her car seat...run through the house collecting dollar bills and quarters...cram the baby back in the car seat...and then squeal back down the street, just so I could laugh like a fiend while doing the tip-toe running thing that Snidely Whiplash does all the way back to the car with games under my arm. Talk about exhausting.

This is a real coup since the holidays are coming up, and one of my favorite things about the holidays is that my brother-in-law flies into town to stay with us, and the three of us stay up into the wee hours of the night playing endless games of Clue together. Our trio just gets super competitive, scribbling little notes in margins and meta-gaming facial expressions. Plus we gorge on snack foods the whole time, like Win Schulers and Wheat Thins.

And now, we're going to be able to mix it up with the 1988 "Master Detective" game, since it's the basic Clue game padded with extra characters, rooms, and weapons. Bigger is better, right? More to suspect. And the new Miss Peach reminds me of something straight out of the cast of Designing Women. (In fact, wasn't she the character that replaced Delta Burke?) Anything Delta Burke-ish HAS to be great.

Then there's the "Museum Caper" game, which I have never played before. But the very fact that it's a 3-D version of Clue with mysterious locks...yeah, I'm stoked. What really piques my interest is the possibility that it's an independent twist on the Clue game. I'd like to have a different experience with the fun murder-mystery feel. For right now, it definitely looks Wheat Thin-worthy.

221B Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes and the Time Machine is a complete mystery to me--from its not-so-easy-to-remember name, to its core gameplay structure. I know it's a mystery game that revolves around the Sherlock Holmes character, and that this is an updated 1996 bastard son version of the original 1970s game. Other than that, I will have to rely on my sleuthing abilities to figure out this enigma of a game...by pulling out the damn instructions and reading them. But I think I'll look cute in the Holmes hat. Right?

And no matter what, $1 per game is a bargain. So even if I only play it once and send it to the Origins auction next spring, then I still more than got my money's worth. Go, go, garage sale power!